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I ate it so you don't have to, Back-to-School edition: Ranking the Top 10 Lunchables

There are few greater disparities of human emotion than the feelings of horror and joy felt when August finally gives way to September.

The horror: The realization as a child that you've been sentenced to nine months of waking up at some ungodly hour and looking at a book talking about some place called Mesopotamia.

The joy: That moment for parents when -- for real -- the kids are gone. In their place come football, cider donuts, cooler weather and pumpkin spice getting shoehorned into every foodstuff imaginable.

It's the most evil and wonderful time of the year, but at the very least, there's a compromise to be made: Lunchables.

In the mind of a child (OK, my mind as a child), there's some hope to be had in the middle of a school day knowing that somewhere in that old, ratty backpack hanging in the classroom is a beautiful, pre-packaged, processed mass spawned by some unholy synthetic genesis that's packed with preservatives and sugar. Like the school year, it too is terrifying to one party involved and a wonder to the other.

Lunchables

Like any good commercial property marketed towards children, Lunchables has taken advantage of its popularity by breaking out a vast array of snack offerings ranging from unabashedly unhealthy to back-handedly unhealthy.

The mainstays of the Lunchables line are still there. The make-it-yourself pizzas and cracker stacks retain their status in the lunch table Pantheon to this very day. However, since one successful product requires three more to be born in its wake like a sort of children's branding hydra, the Lunchables line has ballooned to a pretty wide collection, each with a few different subsets of its own.

Yay capitalism.

The mix-and-match nature of Lunchables makes it easy to cater to even more specific tastes in the lunch market, an important factor when trying to get into the lunch bags of the most picky eaters imaginable. As a result, the "best" kind of Lunchable, so to speak, depends heavily on the individual consumer's tastes -- in theory.

In reality, Lunchables are more than lunch. They're cafeteria ammunition in the battle of "Who has the coolest lunch?" It's a tale as old as lunchtime, the quest to out-do the other kids at the table while you pop open a Capri Sun and bask in your victory.

Ignoring the fact that it's all, in the end, a contest based on which parents will cave and say "Fine, I'll get the stupid Lunchables," here's a ranking of the Top 10 Lunchables*:

*Note: For the purposes of this list, Lunchables Snacks and Lunchables Uploaded were excluded because A) this is lunchtime, not snacktime, and B) I don't know what you have to do to lunch to "upload" it, but I don't trust it. We're sticking with the classics here. I'm also not going to be reviewing the non-Lunchables items, such as the candy or Capri Sun.

Who thought it was a good idea to give a child a pile of chips, a vat of liquid cheese, a Kit-Kat and a Capri Sun? Because the kids aren't going to touch the salsa since they've got the cheese (and because the salsa isn't very good).

There's a strange amount of spicy kick for a vat of cheese that's geared toward 8-year-olds. There's a bit too much "nacho" and definitely not enough "cheese." There's a fourth grader somewhere that's going to drink that pool of molten cheese right to the face and they're going to suffer as a result. The chips are vaguely tortilla flavored and have a weird bit of pale corn aftertaste.

9. Lunchables Chicken Dunks

Contains: Chicken nuggets, ketchups, Nerds, Capri Sun

Years ago, at Clara Macy Elementary School, we had a few different options for lunch, none of which were very good. Most usually settled on pizza. But every now and then, us kids would go for the chicken nuggets, which we joked were made out of gym mats.

The nuggets were spongey and had little chicken-y flavor to speak of (McDonald's nuggets were gold compared to these). But they did have one redeeming feature. They bounced -- high.

The Lunchables Chicken Dunks are probably worse than those. They either taste like nothing or ketchup. Fortunately, they come with ketchup.

On the downside, they do not bounce. (Warning: Do not attempt to bounce chicken nuggets in your office. Someone will notice.)

8. Lunchables Breakfast Waffle & Bacon Dippers

Contains: Waffle sticks, syrup, bacon bits

There's a belief out there that the Taco Bell Waffle Taco is the bottom of the fast-food barrel. If that's the case, the Waffle & Bacon Dippers tunneled through the bottom of that barrel and into the sewers.

The syrup is fine, as are the bacon bits. The problem lies in the waffle sticks, which taste old -- and not a stale old either. They taste old like they've been stored in a warehouse since World War I. The texture is somewhere between spongy and ratty drapes.

What is a Kabbobble, you say? Great question. How is it like a pizza? Even better question, because, even after eating it, I'm still not sure I fully understand.

In theory, the Kabbobbles are a series of snacks that are supposed to be impaled by the pile of pretzel sticks that have been included to inflate the total amount of food in the package. I suppose, in a way, this is like the pizza Lunchables, if you take away the dough, remove the sauce and unshred the cheese.

Remaining are the plastic protein disks that the box refers to as pepperoni and the alarmingly uniform obelisk of American cheese. On the plus side, the pretzel sticks are pretty good. wrapped in cheese and pepperoni stuff, it's decent. Still, this gets docked points for slandering the name of pizza by associating itself with it.

There should be some sort of sauce or some other element to balance out how dry these things are. There isn't.

The wieners in this pack might be mostly bologna, but the prospect of eating these makes me uneasy. There's a definitely lingering mystery meat taste that's best when covered up with the ketchup and mustard.

And in case you've ever wondered if there's extra sugar being slipped in everywhere to cater to kids, the buns taste noticeably sweet by themselves. Overall, though, they're not bad when it comes to hot dogs.

There were an assortment of cheese options here, including cheddar and Swiss, along with a ham alternative. Although, I'm not sure how much the different varieties could've helped out here.

The cheese is sub-par, even for American cheese standards. The turkey is weak and watery. The crackers are fine. Few surprises here.

4. Lunchables Chicken Popper Kabobbles

I hate to come back to the pretzel sticks, but considering everything else these things have to work with, they might be the Lunchables MVP, which says a whole lot about Lunchables in general.

The Chicken Poppers, which came off as a more flavorful improvement over the Chicken Dunks for some dumb reason, make a pretty good combination when combined with the lipid texture of the cheese and the saltiness/crunchiness of the pretzel sticks.

This one loses points for being the most expensive of the bunch -- a bit of an unfair advantage. Still, the Deep Dish Pizza with Pepperoni is the first Lunchables offering that tastes kind of good.

The deep dish pizza is simply a bigger, deeper version of the classic pizza offering (more on that in a bit), carrying the same bread-like texture and sweet flavor of the sauce.

The big standout is the smoothie, which comes in as the poster child of Lunchables trying to be healthy, despite the disclaimer on the pouch that reads "*NOT A LOW CALORIE FOOD" on the back. Still, the first three ingredients in the smoothie are "water, strawberry puree and banana puree," a level of ingredient legitimacy found nowhere else in the vast menagerie of Lunchables offerings.

Coming back to these, years after last parting ways with them in elementary school, I was fully expecting to see my memories shatter before my eyes, like that time I realized that -- wow -- "Angry Beavers" is nowhere near as funny as I remember it being.

However, even with so much changing over time, Lunchables Extra Cheesy Pizza holds up, even as its unbalanced and cartoonish elements become more prominent.

Lunchable Pizza is like the "Space Jam" of foods. As a child, it's enjoyable because there are so many bright and colorful elements shoved into your face. As an adult, you come in to appreciate the uncultured genius that goes into it. Yes, the dough is really more of a flour-y flatbread. Yes, the sauce is overly sweet. Yes, the cheese is more of a processed texture filler. But still, it tastes good in almost a dessert-like way.

It doesn't taste like pizza -- nor does it try to. Instead, it tastes like what an 8-year-old thinks pizza should taste like, which is sweet (both in terms of sugar and bodaciousness).

1. Lunchables Breakfast Bacon & Pancake Dippers

Contains: Pancakes, syrup, bacon

Lunchables pizza entered the Top 10 competition as the shoe-in favorite, the king of lunchtime in every imaginable plane of existence. Even so, there was only one option for the top spot: the only Lunchables option that tasted good with no qualifiers.

In my case, the first taste of the Bacon & Pancake Dippers resulted in legitimate double take. Coming off of the Waffle Dippers, I was expecting a bland, cold, uncooked pancake that I was forced to dip in syrup because a box told me to. Instead, I was greeted by an astonishingly rich pancake bit with a dense, buttermilk texture that soaked up the syrup and blended well with the bacon bits.

The pancake isn't dry and crumbly like an old pancake, it's a robust pastry like a good biscuit.

To the Lunchables Breakfast Bacon & Pancak Dippers, I offer the greatest compliment I can bestow: It tastes like real food.